John Thomas Allen is a 37 year old poet who has poems in two journals that are coming out soon. He hopes to finish a series of prose poems about the origin of “The Marvelous” before the end of the year. He would encourage anyone to viciously criticize Donald Trump whenever and wherever they feel like doing it.
I Am Not
“I want my son to grow rich and successful through the pursuit of science”–Rimbaud
I am not the Nesquik tourniquet wired to a sucrose image
factory in Dorian Grey’s commodified purple parlor.
I am not a miniaturist’s sample or his toys
frosted in a lunar dumbwaiter, my eye in it.
I am not the Greek choral fugue,
the occult order’s recorded applause.
I am not a sour patch kid with ingots in my eyes.
I am the monk’s cell in a red birdhouse,
initials carved in Aramaic graffiti,
music from a shepherd’s flute.
I am not Norman Rockwell’s smile
Tea stains, a bad back, and Oppenheimer
always about to approach.
I am not the auroral stache
on Jarry’s self portrait.
I do not have to ^/—, text, or rhyme.
I am not a filed dream cube
secretly placed as cinemascopic
larvae subtitles seen crawling
in the blind man’s brain, his first glimpse
a gathering of flies on the mad optometrist’s
3D test sheet.
I am also not Gumby’s smile, slowly protruding
drenched in room key digits,
half mirror and half street gold
drooling in alchemical numbers,
Pokey’s sect and code to his private parties.
I am not the fat stuntman in the ventilation system
suspended in the vent during
first minute of imaginal entropy
of my life or a coptic MISSING poster
framed in pyrite gold.
I am not a carousel of trick mirrors.
Don’t read this and call it yourself.
I am not the T Square
of ocean light
trailing the dead poet
home in a casket of water.
I am not the arid cyclops ballerina
standing on one sea blue porch
playing star notes on a crooked spine.
I am not a mouth full of cuckoo clocks.
I am not the Wendigo’s dowsing prayer,
though my cement prayer hands still love
That Which Should Not Be.
I am not the sound the man makes
In peeling bells his insane ideal self,
his catechistic bird index stutters
every fifteen minutes
looking out on the world
in constellates of howling glass zebras,
dislocated howls flooding the city’s streets.
I am an idiot’s frightful pun,
De La Mare’s daily walk ablaze with howls,
a suddenly missing mustache
a peony pearl wishbone
LogoPoetics: Towards a Marvelous Prayer
You wake and woke and upon waking stillness
through and through always still waking corridors,
You are dreamt and upon dreaming the mad
mage’s exile
the Hour of the Wolf crows,
and your freedom sown
In the bodiless mesmerist’s occult codex
burns with ciphers and hexes.
The mad mage’s exile, his search for the seraphim’s
holy word.
In sandblasted times, there are books, bouquets
of eyelids peeled from sundials in greater need
of sight. There is a deep bone song, the doldrum’s
rattle and dawning rod, the pure manque,
on the horseman’s incorruptibility
sounds a dawning ore of morphia jazz.
His eyes spun with dilatory decoys,
palm upwards, stroked with ash anagrams
and Indian feathers, The Hand of the Left Path
will grasp for you, fingers fat with rings.
The dumbwaiter’s shift, lunar plate glass
The anteroom’s angled moon parlor glare,
His body without organs
Carried away in measured pounds
Cut with codes by the Doctors
His pair of eyes spilled in the corner
split in howling octave
howling aeons of clipping shade
You will wake to hear
an echo of night’s abandoned chamber music,
the guitar beat’s lead voodoo,
the Wendigo’s eldritch prayer
the grove, pinched flames
in the burning tears of stiff scarecrows,
Hollowed eyes bonding in empurpled cold.
Behold the artificial kingdoms beatified
by marigold borders of maenad imaginal entropy
You will first be a star faced novitiate,
an inductee, the initiate, a darkroom’s denizen.
Let the demonologue’s dialect begin,
O Mouth of Shadows
utter the Word
in broken murmurs, fractured shades.
Remember
Time zones split in lollygagging fractions,
Racoon deliriants fire off like mortar shells
from ice cream cones,
A shadow becomes a theater curtain,
white space an enroaching eon.
These Lost Steps creep backwards
Our derealized encephalitics have arrived to build
your obsidian museums with gratitude
for incantatory incousiance, for good things,
for A World In a Kiss
For These Carnival Things Always For The First Time, Always
Let the Saturnine Night
fall as the rorschach box
fall as fountain tears from a manque’s cheeks.
Le Momo’s galleries sifting as sand in time
Primitives weaving astral hydrangea in moon
kissed soil, the march of nighttime’s seal;
nightmare root.
Let the Order of Bergson’s Memory Dial spin,
tin in the radial light of dilated time
the stitched ephemera quilted in linearity’s
inattention, the poet a chimera in memory’s
spilling as an easel yet in stasis.
Let the Order of the Satin Moon unfurl
on the dark porch woman,
her bamboo body
wooden hands rotating
starfish crown wig,
sudden eyes seized in crosshatches
of consensual conditioning, ore only harvested
for stars, language coding instinct
,
sealed in extremities,
shifting back and forth in the binding
spandex age slips under the skin.
These Lost Steps knock toward you
The Sewing of Echoes
And Here Is The Order of the Novalis Star
Let her have the Hour of the Blue Flower
Christabels ring, the fitful alterations
of sealed nights deep in settling
stomachs, the moon genuflects
in the Grandfather clock’s gold plated
seal, writ upon by idle ghosts.
Sacred ground holds Sophia, a Novalis
star weeps. A hidden wisdom, earth, Eros’
nucleus.
Let the Order of Artaud’s Black Star Begin
Room at Rodez:colloidal doorknob, pulsing like a razor
angled membrane, still with absolute coma acuity,
eyes annihilating diamonds rolling in seismic shock,
eclictic orbs, room filled with larvae plumes, smoke
notes in the tapeworm’s open body smeared with
smoke notes.
Semaphoric bird, semiotic thorazine shuffles, spiritual
daughters, barbed stars in a black orchard’s bursting
fissions of jade fireflies, paranoiac blue hours,
laudanum ouroboros, hatchling rebirth
without organs, marred by dream’s muted seal,
pinned agitations of Balinese puppetry:
abandoned quiet room’s hours of tuneless aqua, styrofoam rocks.
Each sigil serrated with the signaling in pulse, paid blowdarts at dawn
dissolute of possible orders. Artaud keeps Fourier’s fecal stars in a Cisa Mystica.
Vulpine nocturnes spat from a sewage pipeline forming a maze in a dark poet’s
rentless tomb; this to celebrate earth’s grinding nightmare tropics, the body above all.
